


Trial By Iron

by mortalitasi



Series: ad lucem [2]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age II
Genre: Adventure, Angst, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-20
Updated: 2014-06-20
Packaged: 2018-02-05 10:55:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,672
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1816060
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mortalitasi/pseuds/mortalitasi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Of all the things he's ever called Hawke in his head, foolish was not one of them - but it's the only thing that comes to mind while watching her take on the Arishok.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Trial By Iron

Fenris has watched men without number die.

It’s nothing new to him. Death has no particularly profound meaning among anything Tevene. You die, and it’s the end of you—physically, anyway, if you’re worth your salt, and if you aren’t, no one is going to miss you otherwise.

In a world where slaves are treated worse than chattel and livestock, you don’t learn to attach much value to something like your life. It’s a resource, like everything else you possess and can offer to the magisters. They _own_ you, down to the very blood in your veins. You have no say over when and how it’s spilt, have no say when you have to bear witness to mother and child being torn apart because the magister’s apprentice needs someone young and healthy to practice on. When the blows fall and your fellow slaves pass away in the night, things begin to lose any sort of import, and that is if they had some in the first place.

But everyone dies, at some point or other. Even the magisters. It’s one fate they all share, soporati, magus, altus, freedman. It’s… comforting, knowing that the master that holds your whip will one day breathe his last just like any other man. It might even be painful. Some will die screaming. That thought alone gave him solace when nothing else could.

He’d lied to Sebastian, the day the prince had asked him about if he’d ever thought about ending it. Ironic as it may seem, the inability to die on his own terms was one of the things that kept him going. He’d thought, if I _am_ going to leave, to stop existing, I’m going to do it the way I want to. No Danarius or Hadriana will ever interfere. A man has a right to his death just as much as anything else he has a right to—but slaves don’t have rights. They don’t even have names, sometimes. He’d wanted freedom. Freedom of choice, of mind, of spirit and body, and it wasn’t something he could obtain by staying.

He wanted the chance to make his own choices, good or bad. Wise or foolhardy. To gain the right to wallow and the right to move past the reach of a past he’d not been able to remember. It was not right, being prisoner to something he knew nothing about. If he was going to do anything, even if it were to just meet self-made conditions of death, he was going to do it on his own.

 _My choice_.

And now that he’s teaching himself and being taught about existing like a free citizen of Thedas should, he finds it hard to believe he ever contemplated throwing the gift of living away.

There are things one should stay alive for, even if they are small and often unnoticeable. Things like the glare of the sea when shores of the Wounded Coast are calm, once in a blue moon, and the taste of fresh fruit or cold water; the feeling of peace when you don’t miss the moment of the sun rising over the horizon and its light edges over everything, spreading like the slow drag of honey. Things like seeing Hawke smile, or listening to her trying to restrain a rare peal of laughter, and soaking in the warmth of her skin when she passes him, surefooted and steady. Things like the sensation of going to sleep with a full stomach, and the temporary buffer of certainty when he does something he knows to be right.

It’s silly, for a warrior so conditioned to mindless brutality to be grateful for his continued survival or for anyone else’s. He’s not accustomed to the feeling of worrying for anyone but himself before a battle.

He’s never known Hawke to get gravely injured—only scrapes and bruises, nothing that bothered him much before he got attached to her, but now he is the first to protect her flank when enemies close around them. Fenris has heard his own voice become embarrassingly strained with the anxiety of seeing her hurt. She seems content enough to test the limits of it every day. Mages always fought in support where he came from, even those powerful enough to control entire platoons with the hypnotism of their blood magic. Hawke, however… is more like a qunari war machine.

More often than not she takes point on their excursions, keeping opponents at bay with spells fueled by a pool of mana even Fenris finds scarily impressive. It takes a good long while for her to start tiring, and when fatigue sets in she becomes canny and suspicious, compensating for her lack of magical defense with surprising physical strength. Another aspect in which she differs from the magisters. They always grew complacent with their power, never did much to toughen their bodies or accustom themselves to any sort of manual labor. Hawke wields a dagger until she is forced to use magic in combat, and is markedly dangerous when she takes up a spear.

She encourages anyone to test her. Isabela’s been more than happy to take her up on that offer, and though Hawke cannot match the Rivaini’s frightening speed or skill with dual weapons, she is smart enough to pull her punches and make what she has count. Their matches end up as draws on bad days, and the victories fluctuate since neither contestants are above playing dirty. He has no doubt, however, if Aisling did not restrict her use of magic during the duels, that Isabela would be very dead, very quickly. He’d questioned her about those self-imposed limitations, once.  

“Too much magic makes things too easy,” she’d said, kicked aside her staff, and then rolled up the white sleeves of her tunic, making a beckoning gesture with her hands. They’d traveled out to the Wounded Coast on a whim that day, and the sand in a low-tide lagoon they’d found made for a perfect sparring rink. “Come at me.”

Hawke is tall, for a human, but even with the diligent upkeep of her physique, she’s no berserker—it’d been gratifying to discover just how unchallenging it was to lift her from the ground. It had won him the match and soon afterward turned into a source of entertainment for him.

“You’re smaller, but you’re denser. I’ll give you that,” she had grumbled, staring down at him with grey eyes, clutching at his arms for support. He’d almost laughed, but had only set her down softly on the sand again, hands lingering at her waist.

“That’s not much of a compliment.”

“I haven’t exactly had much practice in giving them.”

“You are forgiven.”

She’d snorted at him like an affronted horse. “Thank the Maker for that.”

What she’s doing now is different—so different and so dangerous he has a hard time believing he’s going to be witness to it playing out. Even at her height, Hawke looks tiny compared to the towering bulk of the Arishok, her staff a stick, her dagger a toothpick. The blades he holds in his clawed hands easily surpass her in length at least once over, but she doesn’t seem intimidated. She just looks solemn, faintly angry, an expression that has become commonplace to her when she deals with the Qunari or their leader.

“You can’t do this!” Isabela says from where she’s standing beside Aveline, drawn and unhappy. Perhaps she regrets coming back.

Aisling acts like she hasn’t even heard. She turns to face the Arishok, and that is when urgency bids Fenris to step up. Isabela is right. _She can’t do this._ He doesn’t touch her for long, just grasps at her upper arm for a mere moment to get her attention. The heat of her body lingers in his palm when he pulls away. It is difficult to speak when she’s looking at him.

“Hawke,” is all he manages, and the sharpness of her features softens at his voice. She pauses for an instant before going on, right when their eyes meet.

“Trust me.”

He _does_. It’s those gigantic weapons of the Arishok he doesn’t trust.

“Hawke!”

It’s Isabela this time, but Aisling doesn’t listen any more than she did at first. She looks up at the Arishok with a challenging glint to her eyes and takes the staff from her back, driving the end of it into the floor so that it makes a sound like a judge’s gavel. It echoes through the hall, strident as a crack of thunder. Ice gathers underneath Aisling’s feet, transparent and pointed. Her group of companions takes a step back, but the Arishok doesn’t move, only lowers his yellow-and-black eyes to the ice in cool contemplation.

“I accept your challenge,” Aisling says, and Aveline has to pull Isabela back by the arm to stop her from springing ahead.

The Arishok seems pleased by her answer. “Meravas!” he proclaims. That is to mean the acceptance has been returned. “So shall it be.”

In some silent accord with the Arishok, the rest of the Qunari move away and around the edges of the room, corralling the remaining nobles and the companions, relegating them to narrow spaces along the hall, until Hawke and the Arishok are the only ones left standing at the lowest platform in front of the Viscount’s throne. The Arishok hefts the arms from his shoulders, one sword and one Qunandar-made axe, and spins them in his hands.

They turn like giant pinwheels, mesmerizing, until he snaps them straight upward and _lunges_.

Isabela makes a sound that’s halfway to a strangled gasp, but Aisling has already moved back and out of the blow’s sweeping path. He can hear the pound of his heart in his ears as he watches Hawke duck under another strike with scant inches to spare. The Arishok’s swords sing a low whirring song when they cut through the air—a clear sign of how much force is behind every arc. Hawke avoids them with all the nimble grace years of being a mage has taught her, using her staff to compensate, as though it’s a third leg, always clearing out bare seconds before the Arishok’s strikes can connect.

She’s assessing him for a weakness. Fenris has seen her do this hundreds of times over. She must have decided on trying something because the next time the Arishok brings one of his swords down over her a wall of ice rises to meet him. The blade bulls through a good half of it before stopping, and the Arishok is trying to pull it away when Aisling sidles in nearer, presses her palm flat against the ice, and lets a stream of lightning the color of springtime violets course through the barrier. It travels over the water easily and climbs up the Arishok’s sword like a creeping vine of ivy growing too fast. They all hear the sizzle and pop as the electricity finds her opponent’s skin.

If the Qunari men are at all anxious for their leader, they do not show it.

The Arishok shakes the shock of lightning off with a carelessness reserved for wringing water from a cloth, stands at his full height, and charges again.

Fenris has to hold his breath as Hawke stands her ground. She spreads her feet wide and tightens her hands around her staff. When she drives it into the floor, the stones ripple like the disturbed surface of a lake, and columns of rock and stone shoot up around her.

The thundering of the crashing boulders drowns out any of dismayed cries the gathered nobles make—if there was any doubt Hawke was a mage before, there is none left of it now. She maneuvers the pillars in a show of fluid elegance Fenris did not know she had in her. The first of them strikes the Arishok clean across the chest, and it staggers him before he has the time to raise his blades to parry. Hawke doesn’t wait. She sends the next two after him in quick succession, drawing from her mana so rapidly that a sheen of a faint blue light gathers around her hands.

It’s not enough to knock the Arishok off his feet. Fenris is not sure much can.

Hawke is preparing the last pillar when the Qunari wheels on her, lowering his head and charging like a common bull, the gilded parts of his horns gleaming wickedly in the torchlight.

She has to abandon the spell—the stone crumbles and collapses around her as she bodily throws herself to the side. The Arishok barrels past her but turns with alarmingly good control for one so large and swings a blade outward again. This time it catches her on the upper arm, slicing through mail and tunic and biting into the flesh beneath. The utter force of the knockback sends her veritably flying, but she gains her balance again by raising the ground behind her in a protective circle. It gives her time to reorient.

The Qunari, however, isn’t waiting. He charges once more, directly, and some noblewoman screams like a gutted pig.

“She’s going to die!”

“Shut up!” Isabela bellows back, but Fenris’ eyes are fixed on Hawke.

He sees the shock in her face when she realizes she won’t have the opportunity to dodge this one. To her credit, her reaction is lightning-fast. She begins weaving a spell immediately, hands moving so swiftly he has no idea what kind of spell it is until a thick, vapory cloud coalesces between her palms, writhing like a live thing caught in a net—entropy.

One of the most favored classes of magic in the Imperium. The closest the archons and all their apprentices can get to blood magic publically, at least, though it does not afford the precision blood magic offers over its victims. Danarius loved to send those disobedient to him into sleep and twist their dreams. Some of them never woke. Fenris has seen that sickly green fog descend on a slave many a time before. Not once were the results anything wholesome. Will it even work on the Arishok? The Qunari always say they dream differently, tout that with pride. He feels his muscles lock as he looks on, between the shoulders of the Qunari standing in front of him.

The spell hits the Arishok in a rush, washing over his head and shoulders as though it has a mind of its own—and the effect is instantaneous. Though he does not relinquish hold over his weapons, he clutches at his head and howls like a man being stretched on the rack, bending over double until his horns are almost skimming the carpeted floor. A small flicker of astonishment travels through the Qunari and their captive audience. One of them even turns to his brother-in-arms, no doubt ready to ask a question, but his towering compatriot (a Sten, Fenris thinks) just shakes his head and gestures back to the fight.

It’s not much of a fight now, though. The Arishok stumbles back with the tendrils of the entropy spell thrashing about him wildly, and Hawke follows.

If she’s smart about it, she may find an opening now—she has no chance of killing him when he is fully aware unless he is exhausted, and getting to that point is impossible. Qunari do not tire at the same rate as others, and though Hawke is formidable, she is no match for that sort of stamina in even _normal_ Qunari, much less the head of their military. Fenris has no problem processing all this, logically. But it still does not stop the worry rising in him as she edges closer, taking care not to be caught in the frenzied crossover of the Arishok’s weapons.

Fenris hears Varric suck in a sharp breath beside him.

“Come on, Hawke,” the dwarf is muttering, tightening his gloved hands so far there is an audible creak of leather.

For about half a minute, it all seems to be going well. Hawke slants her arms back, lightning twining around them in flickering blue, and the Arishok grows still, as though he is preparing to receive her attack. His clawed hands stop moving, and then his fingers twitch around the hilt of one of his blades—the long, knifelike one with two prongs. Too quiet. Something’s wrong.

Hawke reacts before anyone in the sidelines, but it is still not quickly enough. She jerks back, the spell dying in her hands, and the spectators gasp when the Arishok brings his axe down on the corner of her tunic, pinning it to the floor. He lets go of his weapon and abandons it to seize Hawke by the throat. A dismayed gasp travels among the ranks of the terrified spectators.

Just his palm alone dwarfs the entirety of her shoulders and neck, his thumb large enough to easily span the space between her chin and lips. Hawke drops her staff as the Qunari lifts her from the ground with the same lack of care children afford their oldest and most battered toys. Fenris’ mind skips ahead and predicts what comes next before his heart has even the time to register the torrent of emotion that floods through him at the sight of Aisling so obviously stripped of all her defenses.

The Arishok raises his arm and thrusts the other one forward, like a knight at a jousting match—the sword cuts through her mail and robes as though they’re nothing more than parchment. A wet sort of tearing sound fills the hall when the angled edge of the blade peaks from her back, red shining along its length in evidence of what it’s done.

 _No_.

Hawke’s hands press around the area at her front where the sword is stuck fast, her features slack with disbelief. She opens her mouth as if to say something, but the only thing that does is make a slow trail of blood dribble from the corner of her lips to slip down her chin. The Qunari shakes her, as though she’s a lamb on a spit, and her limbs dangle slackly. She’s a puppet that’s been cut free of all its supporting strings. The Arishok turns to address the crowd, still holding Hawke and the sword up in a macabre display. There is no expression on his impassive face—only his eyes betray any sort of emotion, and what Fenris sees there is something capable of curdling the blood of better men.

“One day we shall return,” the Arishok declares, just above being too quiet to hear, but Fenris has no doubt every single person in the hall did not mistake what the Qunari just said.

Someone beside him makes a choked noise, one that precedes weeping, and he realizes it is Varric.

“I can’t watch,” he says, hanging his head, and Fenris finds he doesn’t know why he’s staring at this point either. Just looking at her makes his stomach twist. He wants to vomit. He wants to cry. He wants… he doesn’t know what he wants.

All he knows is that when he sees Hawke’s hands shakily grasp the part of the blade just above the hilt, the move doesn’t make any sense to him. She’s curling her fingers when the sparks start to jump from between her palms, scarlet and orange and all wicked colors to ever be. Isabela gasps, somewhere in the background, and Aveline starts so hard that the resulting clank of her guardsman’s plate is clear and noisy. The crowd reacts like fire taking to dry kindling.

Fenris doesn’t have to look at the spiraling ribbons of blood curving down from Hawke’s wound, around the weapon, and straight over the Arishok’s wrist to realize what she’s doing. He’d always thought her capable. He’d never inquired about it. There is no way to ask the one mage you care for if they know how to work forbidden spells.

He supposes he has his answer.

The enchantment reaches its crux with a boom, rearing up above the forms of the Arishok and Hawke in a glittering surge of magic and blood. There are things, shapes in the red, creatures and symbols that he doesn’t want to think too long about lest he start identifying them—there is fear that way, he’s learned, when you dwell on something and then understanding hits you. He tears his eyes away from the wild tumble of the spell and looks at Hawke instead, whose face is pale, so pale, but her whitened lips are pressed into a hard line of concentration, and her eyes stand out like coins of silver caught in ice.

The color of them is changing. From the grey that is so familiar to a shade three breaths away from vermillion.

He’s seen that same color on Danarius and Hadriana—on almost the entire circle of the magister’s acquaintances. It’s a sign of powerful magic at work, forces a mortal with no extraordinary tie to the Fade could ever hope to fathom. Fenris had often wondered what it would be like to be a mage, when he’d stopped hating them long enough to entertain the thought. What it’d be like to curl a fist and watch flames go up on your command, or to lift things with your mind, to sunder the ground with a simple touch. What it’d be like. Terrifying. He doesn’t begrudge them their fear. Only the danger it brings to others.

The nimbus of the blood magic is swirling just inches away from the hall’s tall vaulted ceiling, and Fenris can feel the stones beneath his feet vibrate. Were this place built less sturdily, it’d be collapsing.

“What is she doing?” Aveline shouts over the rumble of the spell, sounding panicked. Fenris turns his head back to Hawke to see her forcing her way down the blade, till the edge of her bloodstained tunic is pressed flush against the hilt.

Isabela kicks at the floor and tears her bandana off with one hand, raking her fingers through her hair as though that’ll hide the tears in her eyes. “Sodding fool! I should have never trusted her! She’s going to get herself _killed_.”

“She’s not dead,” Fenris snaps at her, but the protest rings hollow.

Any further conversation is stalled by the fact that an explosion strong enough to rock the entire hall happens when the magic overhead blasts outward.

Bits of plaster and pebbles rain down from the columns to clatter along the ground, though no one pays them any mind. A low hum starts, softly at first, and then gaining volume, until Fenris’ jaw is clenching and his teeth knock and his ears pop with the strain. The red storm clouds are being drawn back to Hawke, as though someone is siphoning them to her through a tube. The Arishok is frozen—and not by shock. His eyes move but the rest of his body remains locked in place, and Fenris knows then that Hawke has taken hold of the Qunari’s mind.

It scares him like nothing else.

For but an instant, everything in the hall is still: the Qunari guards, standing shoulder-to-shoulder, the scattered packs of beaten nobles, the jumping pebbles and the reverberating walls; even Hawke, her hands clasped in a vice-like grip around the edges of the Arishok’s blade, blood seeping out between the clasp of her cut fingers.

And then it all falls apart. The magic descends like a heavy fog and disappears in branching fronds of burgundy, and Fenris’ exhausted mind thinks it is gone, but when he notices the muscles bulging on either side of the Arishok’s head, he realizes that just up and vanishing would be high on the list of what blood magic doesn’t do.

As the entire packed hall looks on, the Qunari leader’s skin turns from healthy to ashen, and each tributary and tiny crook of his every vein rise from it like an embossed pattern carved in wax. The drone of the magic is back, oppressively loud. It slinks into Fenris’ skull and pushes from the inside out, and it’s all he can do not to clap his hands over his ears and give into the urge to kneel and hide. Isabela is trying to block the sound out with her bandana, and Aveline is gritting her teeth so hard that the tendons in her jaw have tautened like wires of iron.

Every noble in the hall screams when the first tear in the Fade rips open. Some of them try to make for the doors when the second one appears, shedding its eerie light upon the Arishok and Hawke, but Fenris is watching the arms that creep out of the tears instead of focusing on his jumping pulse. No one is getting out until this is finished. So he looks at the arms while he can. They’re twisted and gnarled, clawed, ribbed with bony white, and they’re reaching for the Arishok.

The Qunari tries to shake free of their hold, but all that does is burden him further. Finally, he seems to make a decision. He lowers his sword-arm, and in a single determined swoop, sends his greatest weight flying. Hawke hits the stairs of the dais with a dull thud, her hair spreading on the fine carpeting, and for one terrible moment Fenris thinks she is never going to move again. But she stirs, braces herself up on her elbows, and Fenris tries not to look at the mess of her abdomen. She moves too far and gives a gurgling cough.

The Arishok makes an advance, ready to take up his battle-axe once more, but she stops him. Hawke’s fingers crack as she holds the enchantment in place, bending it to her will, even though she’s sitting in a pool of her own blood and all the resistance she can offer is a nerveless shuddering of the legs. Fenris draws from experience when he says that blood-fueled spells do not work the same way conventional magic does. They are powered by vitality and violence and pain, anger and hatred, and they do not cease even when the mage loses focus, only when there is no more energy to be drained. No more life left to take.

Hawke’s wrists move, and the monstrous arms mirror her. The points of their talons rasp at the Arishok’s armor, cut into the exposed skin of his arms and collarbone, and tighten there with a disturbing creak of leather mashing against bone. An arm for an arm. The Arishok kicks and struggles as the conjured limbs pry his hands apart and then continue to pull until his shoulders are straining in their sockets. He roars like a dying animal, the gold along his horns and the cuffs in his ears catching the glow of the magic. He stops only to look at Hawke, and she looks right back, face grim and painted with streaks of scarlet—before clenching her fists, twisting them in opposite directions, and—

“Holy shit!”

They have to dodge the severed arm that comes hurtling toward them. It hits the wall behind them and flops to the ground, fingers still moving, big enough to be almost as tall as Varric. Isabela reacts first, and kicks it out of the way with perhaps more force than needed.

“Holy shit,” Varric repeats, looking after at the steaming limb.

Aveline just says, “It’s done.” Her disbelief is evident.

The Arishok had come apart not much unlike the chickens the Kirkwall butchers split down the middle on their cutting boards, and the lucky nobles behind the first row of gathered Qunari had been given a very sudden and very warm shower. While they tremble in horror and the ladies clutch their hearts and wail and swoon—and some of the men forfeit their meals—the Qunari step away and the wall of tall, grey guards dissolves with the resistance of loose sand being washed away by river water as the spell fades and the light returns to normal in the hall. Fenris knows they won’t be gathering what’s left of their leader. The body means nothing to the Qun after the soul has passed.

It’s why Fenris lets the apprehension rule him, why he shoulders past some Qunari without a second thought for them, and breaks into a loping run the minute he’s clear to. He slides on the blood, nearly loses his footing, but kneels at Hawke’s side nonetheless. The smoking heap of what used to be the Arishok is yards behind him, and he forgets about it the instant he gets nearer to her. He’s consumed by the idea that her eyes may not open when he bends over her.

“Hawke,” he says, surprised at the rasp in his voice. His leggings are staining. He doesn’t care. Fenris stretches out a hand and moves the hair stuck to her face back and over her temples, smoothing it with the unarmored underside of his gauntlet. “ _Hawke.”_

She comes to, waking briefly, and her lashes seem darker than ever before in comparison to the pallor that has overtaken her. She takes a slow breath that rattles with the sound of drowning lungs.

“He should have… killed me when he had—the chance,” she manages, makes something that might be a smirk, and then coughs. There is only red on her lips now. None in her eyes.

“Don’t be foolish,” Fenris continues, and slips an arm under her back. Staying here is going to benefit no one. If she keeps losing blood at the rate she has been for the last minute—he doesn’t want to think about it. He tastes copper as he rests his other arm below the crook of her knees. “You won.”

“I… suppose I did,” she says. When he gathers her to him she hisses in pain and tries not to tense. “If I’d known… this was what it’d take… to have you touch me… would have done it sooner…”

She never jokes about anything. In fact, he only remembers two occasions on which she’d ever been openly and stupidly sarcastic, and both happened in Varric’s presence. It’s not something anyone but the dwarf can draw out of her. Hawke forges through things head-on. Doesn’t dance around them. That she’s jesting at all right now means that she’s been either addled by exhaustion or that she doesn’t think she’ll be around long enough to have this moment used against her as fodder for Varric’s humor. It has to be the first. He won’t accept anything else.

“You’re not yourself,” is all he says as he stands and tries not to lose his balance on the slippery floor. Already the others are making their way to him. Aveline has gathered Hawke’s staff. Fenris is about to tell her so, but she isn’t responsive. She is too light, and her eyelids are shutting again.

“You know what I did,” she murmurs, and he freezes. “Will you… hate me for it?”

He breathes in, smelling metal and burnt flesh, and holds her a little closer.

“Never.”

\--

Meredith tries to stop them on the way out. He has no mind or eyes for her.

Aveline intercepts her with some niceties or a summary of what’s happened or whatever it is the captain of the City Guard has to say to a Knight-Commander. It’s no business of his. Fenris walks past them all, leaving behind tracks of red on the white marble until the blood on the soles of his feet is too dry to make any sort of imprint.

He jogs down the stairs of the Keep with Varric and Isabela close behind him. He takes to the stairwells linking Hightown to Lowtown with the same pace, attempting all the while to not think about the cooling heat drenching the front of his armor. Hawke does not protest—does not talk, only stays there with her head supported against his shoulder, her breath coming cold and shallow. He suspects she passed out of consciousness some moments after he lifted her.

The few minutes it takes him to follow the passages down to Darktown are a few minutes too many. No one tells him to slow down. He barely registers the devastation the Qunari have caused the city. Not the smoke nor the fire. He avoids the patchwork of corpses laid out at every turn and ignores the various unfortunate survivors of the Qunari raid, young, old, alive, near-dead, burned or beaten or worse.

Bodies of Qunari litter the space in front of the mage’s clinic, though the mage himself is nowhere to be seen. The apostate with the white hair is keeping watch in singed blue robes, holding a quarterstaff with a steel tip. She draws herself up defensively when she notices them moving, but recognition loosens her stance. Her cheeks are smeared with soot and blood, and a stained bandage is all that hides a cut on her neck from their view.

“They came out of nowhere,” she says in her thick Starkhaven accent, wiping at her mouth with the back of a wrist. Her eyes flicker downward to the person in his arms. “There are wounded beyond count, and—oh, Maker, Hawke…?”

Fenris can’t find any words to say.

“Inside, come on,” she urges and strides forth to force the clinic door open.

The inside of the place isn’t any better than the outside. Some Qunari had clearly made their way in, if the spears with Qun-red tassels sticking out of the ground are any indication to go by, but they must have been moved outside after dying. The clinic is already almost packed. The Fereldans living in Kirkwall’s slums haven’t all been as lucky—or skilled—as Hawke. Fenris is sure the greatest part of them is crammed into this ratty clinic, and none of them look too encouragingly healthy. A man without a leg watches them move past him with eyes set so far into his skull he looks dead even now.

The mage is working with his back to them.

“Please wait by the back, I only have two hands and I can’t go any faster,” he says, and Fenris feels his face pull into a scowl.

“Anders,” the apostate says helpfully, because it turns the mage away from the surgical cot he’s making fit for a patient. “It’s Hawke.”

“Lay her down here,” Anders orders. For once, Fenris listens without delay, but stands nearer to the cot than anyone else. He watches the mage’s face go from determined to upset as he surveys the damage that’s been done, and moves aside the halves of Hawke’s breastplate with unusually clean hands.

“She took on the Arishok,” Varric says from somewhere behind Fenris. “You know, the biggest one.”

The healer’s expression of shock remains. “Merciful Maker, I—I’m skilled, but I don’t know if even I’ll be able to fix this.”

It’s like someone’s crushed a live brand to his skin. “What are you saying?”

A flicker of familiar anger as Anders looks up at him. “I’m _saying_ that I can’t make any predictions. She’s in such a state… how long ago did this happen?”

“Fifteen minutes, give or take,” Isabela says, grinding the tip of her boot into the ground.

Anders shakes his head. “The fact that she’s alive at all… Una. Help me with this.”

The apostate breezes past Fenris and leaves her quarterstaff against the wall before pulling her long hair back with the tie around her wrist. She rolls up her sleeves and dunks her hands in the basin of fresh water by the cot—no doubt that’s been boiled three or four times over. Kirkwall isn’t known for the purity of its springs. The apostate unbuckles Hawke’s breastplate with deft fingers, and soon Anders is lifting her from the cot so Una can slide the pieces of it under and away from her. That only serves to reveal the horror of her wound. Red begins to seep from beneath her white tunic.

“We have to stop the bleeding,” Ander says, and frowns as he tugs gently at her shirt. “There have to be parts of it in there, probably pulled in when she was hurt. It looks like she was—”

“—stabbed,” Varric finishes for him. A hush settles over the room at that. Anders is the one who finally breaks it.

“We need room to work.”

Fenris only moves when Varric nudges at his arm. “Come on, elf. We’ll stand guard outside.”

It doesn’t sound convincing. He turns to look back at her as they go, watches the apostate wipe the dirt on her cheeks away with a damp square of linen, then squares his shoulders and faces the exit. 

If he looks any longer he won’t be able to make himself leave.

 

\--

 

It’s a good four hours before they hear anything from the inside.

They spend their time watching the refugees and Darktown citizens come and go. All are too tired to help with the cleanup. So they sit and stare while humans and elves gather their deceased or search for their loved ones among them, while some of them spit on the Qunari—one man even pisses on the prone body of a Karasten, kicks it when he’s done, smashing in the mask made of bone and wood with the heel of his boot, turning the face of the Qunari below it into a bloodless pulp. Someone stops him to drag the stiff cadaver away to an ever-growing pile of the Qunari dead. That’s the pile that’s looted numerous times without protest from anyone and eventually burned without any sort of ceremony.

It doesn’t faze him.

He’s so wrapped up in worrying that he doesn’t even bother to notice Isabela’s nervous pacing—or Varric’s plead for her to stop wearing a track in the ground.

When the door to the clinic finally creaks open, he jumps high enough for his heels to ache when he lands. Anders emerges, looking as unsteady and haggard as any one of his patients. The front of his robes is spoiled, brown with dried and drying blood. His hands aren’t any better. Though he pulled his sleeves back far over his elbows, the color of rust reaches up just past them. He wipes his forehead with the back of a wrist and takes a moment to study the impatient company staring back at him before speaking.

“If she pulls through the night, we won’t lose her,” he says at last. He wipes his palms down on his knees. “I’ve done everything I can. I repaired most of the internal damage, but her body has to do the rest on its own. She needs to rest. Probably be bedridden for at least two weeks.”

“Oh, she’ll love that,” Varric mutters, worrying at his chin with one hand.

The lump has returned to Fenris’ throat. It must have shown on his face because the dwarf nudges his arm again, giving him a weak smile.

“Don’t worry. She’s a fighter. We’ll never hear the end of her having to stay still for longer than a day. She’s going to wake up just to bust our asses over it.”

Such a crude reassurance has never sounded better. Fenris tries to smile back, but he’s sure it only comes out as a monstrous grimace. He’s saved from having to do any further by Isabela.

“This is all my fault,” she blurts. She’s back to pacing. “Hawke’s hurt and she may _die_ and this is _all my fault_.”

“Rivaini…”

“No. I should have just kept on going. They would have come after me and none of this would have happened.”

A harsh bark of laughter escapes Fenris before he can stop it and Isabela looks at him in surprise. “Do you really have such a high opinion of yourself? They’d started a slaughter, and they’d have finished it if you hadn’t come back. Your absence wouldn’t have _moved_ them any more than a breeze can move the mountains.”

Isabela’s pretty lips flatten into a thin line at his words. “Well, I _did_ the right thing for once—and look where it’s got us.”

“You don’t understand,” Fenris retorts, and she flinches. “Hawke _chose_ to fight the Arishok for you. She could have just given you to them, but she didn’t. She decided, for some reason, that saving you was more significant. It doesn’t have anything to do with _you_. Don’t belittle that choice by inflating your importance.”

“I can’t even feel guilty on my own terms, is that it?” she bites back, yellow eyes flashing with anger. “I just watched the best friend I’ve made in the last ten years get _skewered_ and paraded about for all Kirkwall to see. I’m not going to bend over and take your accusations just to loosen the knot you’ve got in your knickers over the fact that she cares about me.”

He grinds his teeth together. “They’re not accusations. They’re statements of fact. You stole the Qunari relic. You _grounded_ them here for years, and we paid the price instead of you. Kirkwall paid the price. _Hawke_ paid the price.”

She throws her hands up in the air, somewhere between exasperated and desperate. “So what do you want me to do about it? Whip myself in repentance? Kneel for you? What’s done is done. I can’t change the past.”

“No, you can’t,” Fenris agrees, leveling a glare at her that would have cowed a lesser woman. “But you can change what you do from now on. If you ever endanger her the way you did today, fearing the Qunari will be the least of your problems.”

Isabela’s mouth grows slack in astonishment and she angles in on him confrontationally, one finger pointing at him in incredulity. “My ears must be stopped up. I could have sworn I just heard you _threaten_ me.”

“Alright, that’s just about enough,” Varric interjects, coming between the two though his height does him absolutely no favors. “You’ll have to save the posturing for later. I’m this close to letting Bianca do the talking for me instead next time.”

Isabela backs off, shaking her head. She throws Fenris one last disgusted glance before wheeling on her heel and walking away. “I need a drink.”

It’s only when Anders speaks that Fenris is reminded he’s still standing there. “Charming.”

“Like you have room to talk,” Varric says, almost laughing. Anders shrugs and opens the clinic door again.

“Are you going to sit with her, or are you going to stay here to enjoy the invigorating Darktown air?”

Fenris is the first through the entrance.

\--

 

They’ve moved her to the back of the clinic, the place that is usually reserved for where Anders rests, and a rickety dressing screen has been stretched out to keep them apart from everyone else. Varric leaves after a few minutes to check on Isabela, saying goodnight as he goes.

The place is quiet. The injured and ill don’t have much to say, and it suits Fenris just fine. Hawke looks almost peaceful in repose, with her hands situated at her sides. Beneath the sheets and blanket she is wearing nothing but some plain slacks and a swath of bandages around her middle. Their linen remains white and unstained. That much, at least, is well. Some of the color has returned to her face, though not all. An ugly bruise is purpling along the underside of her jaw. With her eyes shut and her so deep in slumber like this Fenris can see just how long her lashes are, and realize the full character of her aquiline nose.

Her breaths are unexpectedly even for one so gravely wounded. The apostate with the kind face and the careful eyes had brushed out her hair, cleaned her of the blood and battle-grime.

That one makes Fenris uneasy. He’s always found mages to be aggressive about what they are—she’s the second he’s met other than Hawke that makes him second-guess himself. She’s mostly silent, economic with her words, and always ready to help. He’s seen the way Anders looks at her. A shambling corpse would be too good of a partner for the abomination. The young woman that is tucking Hawke’s hands beneath the blanket is definitely more than Anders deserves. Fenris knows Hawke likes her. She’s often the only reason Aisling has for visiting the clinic at all.

She is about to leave by edging around the screen when he clears his throat and she stops.

“My thanks,” he says awkwardly, regretting it the minute the sentence leaves his lips. It had sounded better in his head. “For…”

She grins brightly at him, her cheeks dimpling. “Don’t mention it.”

And they’re left alone for the rest of the night that way, after Anders only just manages to tell Fenris to call on him if there is any change through a series of jaw-cracking yawns. Una douses the lights in the clinic and dimness settles over everything, though Fenris does not succumb to sleep. That doesn’t happen under normal circumstances anyway, and now that he’s afraid that the moment he looks away she’ll _stop breathing_ —well, needless to say, sleep is the furthest thing from his mind. He tries lying down on the cot Una dragged to the back for him, but it doesn’t work. He ends up tossing and turning, shuffling this way and that, before deciding to just sit up and to the Fade with everything else.

At some point he divests himself of the gauntlets in an attempt to make himself more comfortable. It doesn’t work very well. He still feels electrified by the stress of the day. Every time he shuts his eyes he sees the frozen image of Hawke held up on the Arishok’s sword, her magic dying, the look on her face, and then after that comes the memory of her choking. His stomach knots up again. He gathers his knees close to his body and presses a knuckle to his temple, as though the pressure is going to wipe away all the recollections.

That night, the crawl of every minute feels like the span of a century. Sometime near dawn she starts breathing very, very slowly, enough to make Fenris practically leap from his cot to check that she’s still with him. He sits on the floor, and it’s not a problem because the clinic cots are very low anyway—he could easily reach over to the other side of her bed without even getting up. The downside to this is that he’s very close now, and after he reassures himself that she is in fact drawing breath, he doesn’t know what to do with himself except stay there and stare.

It’s like that for another few minutes until under his observant gaze, Aisling’s wrists move, her fingers jerk, and her eyes open. He props himself up on his knees, feeling his heart jump. She takes a deep breath, like she’s clearing the surface after a long time underwater, but stops short as her face crumples into an expression of pain.

“Lie still,” he says, and she looks at him.

It takes numerous tries for her voice to work.

“How long?” she whispers.

“Just since yesterday afternoon,” he replies, watching the fringe of her hair flopping into her eyes. There is more self-restraint involved in stopping himself from brushing it away from her face than there should be.

“Ugh,” she says. “I am… at the peak of eloquence…”

Fenris chuckles. “I’ve noticed.”

“You’ve… been here? All this time?”

He looks somewhere else. “I haven’t been much help.”

She smiles a little. “I’ll decide that, if you don’t mind. You… didn’t seem to be doing so badly… when you were mopping me up off the floor.”

“I doubt I could have killed the Arishok,” he says bitterly, his eyes lingering on the spot where her wound must be under the blankets. “Why must you always do what’s right?”

“Father’s fault,” she responds. She tries to do something with her hand but it just slides to her side limply and she curses under her breath.

“Don’t strain yourself,” he chastises, but she’s not done yet.

“I meant to ask—has Carver…?”

Visited yet? No. Of course not. Fenris doesn’t know whether he’s busy or not, and frankly, Fenris doesn’t really _care_. What he is concerned about is that it pains him to see her trying so hard for someone whose affection is tenuous at best. _You’re no different_ , a small, grating voice inside him says, spiteful. _You abandoned her, just like everyone else._ At least I tried, he thinks to himself, though the truth of his own self-imposed blame stings with a fearsome bite.

Hawke has taken all she needs from the silence.

“Ah,” she says. “I see.”

Perhaps this is where another person would have said, “He will come by, don’t worry. I’m sure of it!”—but Fenris is too much of a realist (or a pessimist, depending on who you ask) to be able to let himself lie like that. Mayhap could do it to someone else. Not to her.

Aisling turns her eyes to the ceiling. “I feel horrible.”

That coaxes a half-smirk out of him. “I’d be worried if you didn’t.”

“If I ever try doing that again, stop me.”

“I will do my best,” he says, hating the urge he has to burst into relieved laughter. All the tension is wearing away now, and it’s leaving him frazzled. “I can’t guarantee success. You’re known to be—stubborn.”

“One of my many delightful traits,” Aisling sighs, fighting to keep her eyes from shutting. “I don’t want to sleep. Dreams…”

That is a dread he is no stranger to.

“You have to rest,” Fenris adds. He moves to lift the blanket up over her and then thinks better of it and stops. Luckily, she doesn’t notice.

“You’re doing that thing where you’re right,” she mumbles, scowling. “It’s not like I have much choice anyway. I’m… going fast.”

He feels his expression relax into something that might be a returning smile. “You’ve made the city safe again. They owe you a night of good sleep.”

Day, technically, but he’s not too preoccupied with the distinction.

“Right again,” she says, and then she’s silent for a while. It surprises him when she talks again. He’d thought she’d already given into sleep. She extends a hand and brushes the back of her knuckles over his cheek, just lightly enough that he doesn’t feel the need to recoil. She’s always been good at gauging him like that, knowing what is acceptable, not overstepping. She’s probably so exhausted she won’t remember doing this in the morning. With that thought in mind he leans into the contact. Her skin is cool against his.

“Hawke?”

It’s hoarse but recognizable. He’s glad her hand falls back down to the cot when it does. It was inhibiting his ability to think clearly. The look on her face, however, is sobering—and familiar. 

“Stay? Just… for a while…”

She didn’t have to inquire. Perhaps she doesn’t know that. She was at some time certain of what she could ask of him, and he took that away from her. You still know _me_ , he wants to say, but this isn’t the time for it. Later. When her head isn’t lolling to the side in fatigue, and he’s gotten some sleep too. She’s fighting to stay awake, just to look at him a while longer, so he lightly grazes his fingers over hers.

“I will.”

_I didn’t then, but I will now._

She smiles at him again, the second time tonight, third since the afternoon, and closes her eyes. Fenris feels a prickle of unease when he notices the bruise once more, but he reminds himself that she is here and alive and that he didn’t lose her. That will carry over into tomorrow, and hopefully to all the days to come.

Maybe things will be alright.


End file.
